Experiments in the Numinous - Do atheists believe in Dreams?
samsara0
– Jeremy Taylor (Warner Books 1992)
“My favorite example of scientific discovery through dreams involves
Elias Howe's invention of that staple of modern life, the sewing
machine. When James Hargreaves and Edmund Cartwright invented the
spinning jenny and the power-driven loom in the mid-1700s, the
industrial revolution was off and running. However, the absence of the
third necessary invention - a machine that could sew with the same
increased efficiency that the other two machines could spin and weave -
meant that the industrial revolution was stymied; in order to actually
produce finished goods that could be sold, all the mountains of
machine-made cloth still had to pass through the skilled hands of the
medieval Guild of Tailors. The economic and social bottleneck was immense.
The economic pressure to invent a machine that could sew with the same
mechanical speed and quality control with which the other machines could
produce cloth focused a tremendous amount of creative energy on the
problem all around the world, but for more than half a century, the
problem went unsolved.
Here in the United States, Howe began to work on the problem, lured by
the immense amount of money being offered as a reward by the cloth
barons for a solution to their long-standing problem. Having exhausted
all the conventional ideas about building a machine that could sew, none
of which could be made to work, he continued to struggle with the
problem, still without results. Then, some seventy-five years after the
invention of the first spinning and weaving machines, Howe had a dream.
As he recounted it, his memory of the dream picked up in the middle of
the action (as so many dream memories do).
Howe finds himself in Africa, fleeing from cannibals. They pursue him
through the jungle. He flees in desperation, but the natives capture
him, tie him up hand and foot, and carry him back to their village slung
from a pole. There they dump him into a huge iron pot full of water.
They light a fire under the pot and start to boil him alive.
In his dream, as the water starts to bubble and boil around him, he
discovers that the ropes have loosened enough for him to work his hands
free. He tries repeatedly to take hold of the edge of the pot and haul
himself out of the' hot water, but every time he manages to heave
himself up over the edge of the pot, the natives reach across over the
flames and forcibly poke him back down into the pot again with their
sharp spears.
When Howe awoke from this "nightmare," part of his mind noted with some
distance and objectivity, "That's odd - those spears all have holes in
the points." As he came more fully awake, he realized, "Holes in the
points. ..holes in the points! That's it! That's the answer!"
Howe realized as he awoke from his dream that he and all his rivals had
been blinded by the conventional idea of the sewing needle. As a hand
tool, the thread transport hole must be back at the blunt end, where it
is most convenient for the human hand, but all that was required to make
a machine that would sew was to move the thread transport hole up to the
point of the needle, where it would be most convenient for a machine.
Then it was a relatively simple matter to design a system of gears that
would cause the needle to poke the thread down through the layers of
cloth, wrap it around a second thread, and then pull it up again, all
very neatly and efficiently.
Unfortunately, we do not know enough about Howe's personal life and
emotional history to make anything more than vaguely educated guesses
about the layers of meaning and significance in this historic dream that
refer to his personal psychology. However, for us, the primary
significance of the dream, is its collective impact.
This dream released the pent-up energies of the industrial revolution.
With the invention of the sewing machine, the last bottleneck in the
first fully industrial process was broken open."
Dakota
well. A dream is generated in the brain with no supernatural involvement.
Olrik
Pepsi
"samsara0" <sams...@optusnet.com.au> wrote in message
news:4D214544...@optusnet.com.au...
> Where People Fly and Water Runs Uphill
> – Jeremy Taylor (Warner Books 1992)
The "Industrial Revolution" had one hell of a lot more to do with coal and
steam power than it ever did with cloths.
Technally, the device/process that "loops" the thread is more important, and
more elusive to those inventors, than the "eye of the needle".
Either way - atheism has absolutely nothing to do with either one.
(fairy tale, snipped and flushed)
MarkA
> Where People Fly and Water Runs Uphill - Jeremy Taylor (Warner Books
> 1992)
>
The human brain has a difficult time thinking about "old problems" in
entirely new ways, and a great many discoveries have been made by people
who are able to "think outside the box". Probably the best example of all
time is that of Albert Einstein and Special Relativity. While all of the
other physicists of his day were trying to explain the anomalous behavior
of light while retaining the assumption that the speed of light had to be
observer-dependent, as other speed measurements are, Einstein was able to
imagine the speed of light as being a constant, and time as being
variable. The rest is history.
--
MarkA
Keeper of Things Put There Only Just The Night Before
About eight o'clock